terrorism

U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte says it's too early to say whether bombing suspect Ahmed Rahami, an American citizen, should be tried as an enemy combatant, as Donald Trump suggested Monday.

"As an American citizen, you can be treated as an enemy combatant, depending on the situation. But I think it would be premature to say something like that here not knowing all the facts," Ayotte told NHPR's Morning Edition Tuesday.

If a video designed to recruit people into extremist groups pops up online, it stands to reason that you could just flag it to have it removed and the problem is solved. But that’s not so easy. These videos are easily replicated, so one video could suddenly appear on a variety of websites. It’s time-consuming to track down and try to remove each one. One professor at Dartmouth College has developed software that would help find all those copies.

Identifying potential terrorists is crucial to thwarting future attacks. The challenge is discerning real threats from bravado. Today on the show, how do security analysts survey thoughts?

Then, we’ll learn about two young men who embarked on a bold crime spree, stealing thousands of dollars worth of gold and weapons right in front of their victims…the hitch? It all went down in a video game.

The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, claimed allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State during a phone call to 911 early Sunday. And that's reignited a debate over how to label the ideology that apparently inspired the attack.

Republican Donald Trump and many on the right say it's "radical Islam." But Democrat Hillary Clinton used a different term: "radical Islamism." It's not just a debate over semantics.

Homegrown terrorism, gun violence, Zika - there's plenty of real stuff to get freaked out about. So can America be 100% safe? No, says a security expert slash mom, and your kids know it's not. But that's ok. Today, a former homeland security big wig refuses to be ruled by paranoia and offers tips on how to prepare your family for the unknown without becoming a prepper.

Plus, the true story of humble scholars-turned-smugglers to save rare books and manuscripts from sure destruction by Al Qaeda.

In the age of global terrorism, some attacks get more attention than others. We got blanket coverage of coordinated bombs in Brussels, but little on explosions in Turkey just nine days before or the devastating suicide bomb in Iraq a week later. Today, the far-reaching effects of "small" bombs - those exploding in Middle Eastern and South Asian cities with alarming regularity that often go ignored.

Then, a writer reflects on her friendship with Robert Dunn, a character seemingly from another age, known as Portsmouth's Penny Poet.

After Tuesday's deadly attacks in Brussels killed more than two dozen people, we're seeing an outpouring of grief and support from around the world.

Like we saw after the November attacks in Paris, many took to social media to express their condolences and solidarity with the people affected — and latched onto prominent symbols associated with the country.

After the violence in Paris, renditions of the Eiffel Tower and the French flag were widely shared.

Two more high-profile mass shootings this past month have rekindled the national debate over guns, gun rights, and gun regulation. Politicians have weighed in from the Presidential campaign trail and on Capitol Hill, but common ground remains elusive. Some say we need to tighten laws and oversight in the interest of public safety, while others say the solution is for more civilians to arm themselves in the interest of self-defense.

New Hampshire U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte says she has concerns about the timing of a report released Tuesday exposing the CIA’s harsh interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The report from the Senate Intelligence Committee described the CIA’s techniques as “deeply flawed” and found the agency misled Congress and the White House about its methods.

New Hampshire U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen says she’s disturbed by the findings and said releasing the report was the right thing to do.

On April fifteenth, two bombs exploded close to the finish line, of one of the world’s most prestigious races. Many from New Hampshire were running, cheering, or working at the event. We’re talking with a roundtable of Granite Staters about their memories and thoughts over the past year, and what’s changed.

The results of this weekend’s elections, many say, will have enormous consequences for the country’s future - from the status of ongoing U.S. military support, to whether recent civil rights gains are maintained. But the balloting has been marred by violence, and deep-seated concerns about fraud.

“Why did they do it?” That’s one of the first questions on the lips of every reporter and pundit after a tragedy like the Boston Marathon bombing, and often there is no satisfying answer. In cases of domestic terrorism, the motives of the perpetrator leave us with other, equally difficult questions: what separates angry young men, most of whom will never commit acts of mass violence, from those who do?

With Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in custody, the relief many Bostonians felt at his capture turns to anger. While prosecutors have only begun to build their case against the 19-year old marathon bombing suspect, the public has strong expectations of how Tsarnaev’s trial should proceed and how he should be punished.

Leon Neyfakh writes for the ideas section of the Boston Globe, he spoke to criminologists, legal scholars and academics who warn that the trial will likely fall short of the public’s wish for emotional closure, and justice.

The shock and horror of the Boston marathon explosions one week ago today gave way to an almost incomprehensible sequence of events leading to a dramatic day-long dragnet that shut a major American city and several surrounding neighborhoods down. Now, with one suspect dead and his younger brother in critical condition at a Boston hospital, citizens and media alike are grappling to fill in motivations and create narratives that we can understand. Among the most combed-over questions is whether 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev somehow radicalized his popular, athletic, seemingly well-adjusted 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar.

Although the death of Osama bin Laden was a major blow to the terrorist group, al Qaeda, it has found new life in Africa, where groups aligned with its goals and terrorist methods have created what NATO is calling an arc of instability stretching from West African into continent's Horn. We’ll talk with experts on this development and find out what’s at stake for the U.S.

Dina Temple-Raston joins us today. She covers counter-terrorism for NPR, and is in New Hampshire this week. We’ll talk with her about the many new and emerging terrorism challenges that President Obama will face in his second term from Al Queda affiliates in Africa to handling terrorism suspects still incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

In a courtroom at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday, the man accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is expected to testify about the more than four years he spent in secret CIA prisons. Al-Nashiri is one of three terrorism suspects the U.S. government has admitted to waterboarding, so his testimony could be explosive. And that's why, critics argue, the government is trying to ensure that al-Nashiri's testimony be heard in secret.

A branch of the military is taking a new tack in intelligence gathering…video games. The US Navy has contracted a private firm to buy up used gaming consoles - mostly in foreign markets to extract sensitive data on gamers. Jacob Aronwrote about the new strategy for New Scientist.

One thing most of us can agree on is that air travel is at best a mysterious world we don’t quite understand, and at worst, a real annoyance. For the last nine years, Salon has featured a column called "Ask the Pilot,” giving readers an opportunity to get their questions about flying answered straight from the source. Patrick Smith is a commercial airline pilot who writes the column, and he’s agreed to subject himself to our questions...and yours.